Beaver Leaves It All For Las Vegas

A 32-year-old Orlando Poker Player Is Betting He Has What It Takes To Strike It Rich In Sin City.

October 31, 2004|By Rick Maese, Sentinel Staff Writer

This is the story of how Beaver ended up in the City of Sin. He had no job. He had no girlfriend. But he did have a pair of jacks in his hand, and Beaver couldn't have been happier.

That was Friday. He was in Las Vegas -- Vegas, baby! -- sitting at a poker table in the Binion's Horseshoe Hotel & Casino. The game was Texas Hold'em, and for Beaver, it was a dream fulfilled. Even before he knew what cards the other players held, before he knew how big the jackpot would grow, before he knew whether a pair of jacks would beat anything, Beaver was living his dream.

Before we're done here, you'll know whether those two jacks held up, but Beaver's story actually starts a few days earlier, two Saturdays ago. He was inside the Orlando house he'd rented for the past two years. A U-Haul trailer was out front.

Beaver isn't his birth name. His parents named him Stephen Bloom. He has a brother, a couple of years older than him, who couldn't pronounce his first name when the two were younger. The family started calling him Beaver instead, named after the lead character in the 1960s television show, Leave It To Beaver.

So on that Saturday afternoon, Beaver, 32, moved the few remaining items of furniture that he hadn't sold already or given away into the trailer. The next day, he was moving to Las Vegas to put all his chips on the table. Beaver was leaving Orlando to play poker full time.

"We've got one life to live. This isn't a dress rehearsal," is what he'd been telling people. "You've got to do what you want to do. Or at least try.

"I don't want to be 75 someday and wondering, `What if I would have moved to Vegas and tried it?' I want to know if I can make it. I need to know."

Beaver is a great character for our story. He has these soft hazel eyes that really hide a poker player's cunning.

You have to be attentive, he says, to play the game. At the table, he'll notice if you blink, swallow, fidget. A player who keeps looking at his cards has a good hand, Beaver says: "He's scared those pocket kings will disappear."

Beaver talks about poker the way others might talk about a loved one.

"It's my passion," he says.

He had a lot going for him in Orlando. He'd finished his master's degree in business administration at UCF in July. He immediately took a job as a sales manager with a local printing company. His base salary was $55,000.

And Beaver had been dating Kelly Rabe, a pretty young blonde, for about three years. But early last month, he broke up with Rabe. A couple of weeks later, he quit his job. "It was interfering with cards," he said.

It wasn't long before Beaver realized he had to go to Vegas. Since he began graduate school in January 2003, he'd been playing cards 3-5 times a week. Beaver had played everywhere: people's homes, bars in Orlando, a dog track in St. Petersburg, a cruise ship out of Cocoa, a casino in Tampa.

He was pretty good, he figured, averaging about $300 a week in winnings, but he knew his competitors were just hobbyists. For him, the game felt like more.

He started telling friends and family he'd be leaving town soon. His poker buddies -- fellow card sharks who hear poker chips clicking together in their sleep -- they've been telling Beaver, "You're so lucky." Everyone else in the free world responded, "Are you crazy?"

"In a way, I was shocked," said Rabe, who remains best friends with Beaver. "But at the same time, not really. I knew it's the only thing that would make him happy."

When Beaver was younger, he watched his father play poker once a week with buddies, throwing nickels, dimes and quarters on the kitchen table.

"He told me, `Pop, I gotta tell ya something. I'm going to Las Vegas to play cards,' " says Larry Bloom, 72. "I wasn't surprised. It's something he wanted to do." Beaver said his goodbyes two weekends ago and loaded his bed, a dresser, some clothes and a laptop into the small trailer. On Sunday afternoon, he played a final home game -- he lost $20 -- and as night fell, he hit the road. He had $4,000 to gamble and had no intentions of returning to Orlando.

Larry Bloom chuckles, saying his son is "the only poker player in the world with an MBA."

But actually, that's probably not true. Many people hit cities such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J., dreaming about cards, fantasizing about winning a huge pot. Most of them aren't the greasy castoffs you might picture flipping cards in a dark, seedy bar.

Nolan Dalla left a comfortable job with the federal government in Washington, D.C., several years ago to pursue a poker career. He stills plays cards today but also serves as a spokesman for the World Series of Poker, the game's marquee event. He worked on a study five years ago -- before the poker craze became almost unavoidable -- to find out who was playing.